Purple Sweater

Are you Sure

That day Daria and Jane followed other students through the forest as everyone tried to figure out what exactly had happened, the camping guides and rangers looked worried sick and soon the students showed up at a very different area rather far from the visitors center.

It was a vast and grassy meadow a great distance downhill from the main camping area, a beautiful place with rocks, boulders and lakes. The cold rain continued, though not strong enough to discourage the curious teenagers, and there was eerie fog as well, yet not enough of it to conceal what the rangers so desperately wanted to keep secret.

The Woodslack staff had already established a safety perimeter with ropes, wooden signs and orange plastic lines, there was something that the forest rangers were hiding by means of large white screens and the visiting students, all of them curious and alarmed at the same time, were blocked from getting any closer than twenty or thirty yards...

"What could have happened?" Jane wondered, now having a look up at the majestic North Face of Raven Rock, which towered a good three hundred feet above all of them in that beautiful green meadow- "Hey! Hey, Jennifer! What's going on?"

"Somebody got killed" the gloomy and rather burnout blond girl replied, just casually smoking a cheap cigarette as they all waited to get some kind of answer from the rangers- "You see this huge rock? Somebody fell all the way from up there!"

"What? Really?!"

"Yeah, but they don't want us to know what happened..."

"This is what happens when you take Lawndale High to a dangerous forest..."

"Daria! This is some serious shit that happened here!"

"Let's wait and see..."

The curious and worried students waited for any answers from authority, time kept passing and after that they had to wait for some more time... eventually a variety of Police officers showed up at the scene, followed by a medical helicopter from Cedars of Lawndale, and it was then when a sickly pale Miss Morris suddenly emerged from somewhere behind the white screens.

"Jane! Jane Lane! Come over here, right now!"

"What? Me?!"

"Hurry up, Lane!"

"Alright! Alright..."

A silent forest ranger then guided the shaken Jane straight to this concealed little area between huge jagged boulders, Daria stayed behind with a look of curiosity in her otherwise emotionless face and Morris was fast to hold Jane's right hand as she looked very deep into her eyes...

"We have a tragedy, and we think... Lane, we think it's Quinn" Miss Morris whispered, trying to stay calm as she took Jane to the very spot that everyone there were still trying to keep secret- "According to Sandi Griffin and Anna Coulthard, Quinn fell to her death..."

"Oh my God..."

"What you are about to see is very disturbing, alright?"

"Miss Morris, give me a sec!"

"Please, help us out!"

"Fine! Alright..."

They advanced, Miss Morris sighed, the rangers moved aside and then, it happened- Jane at first didn't know what it was, with all that blood and everything else... it was disturbing for sure, and even sickening, and yet... what on Earth was this thing that she witnessed, really?

After all, Jane had never seen what remained of somebody after they had fallen two and a half hundred feet straight into sharp and jagged boulders...

The hair, the jeans, the purple sweater...

It was Quinn.

"Jane! Jane, are you alright?"

"Yeah, it's her..."

"Are you sure?"

"Total positive..."

"Wait here, Jane..."

Jane then just hurried to sit down on a nearby rock as she tried to keep all of that pizza inside of her system, the world started to swirl all around her like she was drunk, Jane feared that she would pass out any moment and everything felt wild and totally unreal...

Just how on Earth was she going to tell Daria?